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The Freemium sales model is a business model innovation best suited to inexpensive products that are very easily understood (and therefore not very new or very different) and that solve an obvious problem in a manner that is more convenient for the customer to acquire and implement. There are not many new virtualization and cloud technology companies who set out to produce undifferentiated products which suggests that a general application of the Freemium model to startups in our ecosystem is ill advised. Enterprise customers should pay great attention to products that are being marketing in this manner to ensure that they do not end up growing the use of something that was purchased in a tactical manner into a strategic use case.

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Last week, there were several major virtualization security announcements, that taken singularly may only apply to the specific products, but taken together show the growth of the virtualization security ecosystem.

New Relic announced that it now support four application types, Ruby-on-Rails, Java, .Net and PHP. New Relic has therefore broken new ground in the question of trade-offs between depth of monitoring into an application, and breadth of platform support. The prior generation of byte code instrumentation vendors never supported more than two platforms – J2EE and .Net. Products that monitor the OS still cannot see into an application the way that New Relic can – and now New Relic brings this depth of insight to more platforms than anyone else has ever address.

When I first got started in virtualization it was a very new technology and during that time there were not that many resources available to the virtualization administrator and sometimes it would have been nice to be able to see what others were doing and to be able to share my thoughts and ideas with others to make sure I was presenting the best possible solution to my customers. During these early years the VMTN Community Forum was established and these forums were the place to do this collaboration. I found this to be one of the best arenas to ask questions and share ideas. The VMTN Community area quickly took off and in a lot of cases was the quickest way to find an answer, solution to your problem or issue you were trying to resolve.

Desktop Virtualization is not an easy undertaking. There – I’ve said it. “But,” you may say, “I take a copy of the desktops I have, I run them on servers in the data-centre. Once that’s done, I don’t need to update those desktop devices; I can update the virtualized workspace instead far more quickly. The desktops are running on server hardware so they will be more reliable. Eventually, someone may well offer to host these workspaces on some infrastructure out in The Cloud”.

Eschewing the virtual desktop for the truly virtual, Microsoft has announced its next generation productivity suite bringing together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service.

The Virtualization Security Podcast on 10/21 was the third in a series of Virtual Desktop Security discussions we are having. The special guest panelist was Chris Mayers of one of the Chief Security Architects for Citrix, the makers of XenServer, XenClient, and the FlexCast solutions. FlexCast provides an all encompassing method to provide virtual desktop and applications that include the following mechanisms:

Let us look at each of these mechanisms in a bit of detail then discuss how they work to provide Security and how to secure them.

While at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco this year, I got to meet up and talk with Robert from Atlantis Computing. Our conversation was about VDI and he was quite proud of the capabilities that Atlantis ILIO brings to the table in the VDI space. The conversation went well and got me interested in investigating a little further on the technology. Atlantis ILIO or “VDI Booster” as they like to call it, is a solution to address the complexity and high costs of VDI Deployment and management. ILIO has been architected to support most of the main VDI players like VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD),and Quest Software vWorkplace to name a few.

On the heels of receiving United States patent approval for its RES Virtual Desktop Extender (VDX) technology, RES Software have announced that it will also be offering VDX as a standalone product. A feature within RES Workspace Manager (formerly RES PowerFuse), VDX serves as a fundamental component in the successful deployment of virtual desktops. It enables local applications that typically do not run smoothly, or at all, in virtual environments to run seamlessly within a virtual session. However, while VDX’s functionality allows wider access to hosted desktops, organisations need to ensure that the management and maintenance of that legacy environment isn’t overlooked to the point where it impacts user experience and the organisation’s security.